All of my ideas during my formal education life in University of Hawai`i at Manoa, 2004-2007

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Women and Partition in India; victimization of women

1. Introduction

Freedom is important for the dignity and honor of people. It is important that a country to show other people and other countries that they have power and the ability to bargain to become independent. In the case of India, freedom became the people’s desire after hundreds of years under British rule. Though freedom can be hard to achieve, Indian history shows that the Indian people wanted freedom persistently. This persistence can be seen through the political action that the Indian people engaged in, including Gandhi and his non-violent movement known as ‘swadeshi’ or ‘satyagraha’. This movement helped to bring the Indian independence in 1947.

Like other countries in the world, violence, it seems cannot stay away from the process of reaching the. During that time, some hostilities were facing the Indian people who were struggling to fulfill their desire for political freedom. Unfortunately, that violence was close to women and they were afflicted by the riot situation directly. They became victims of kidnapping and rape. Women were separated from their families, parents and even their religion. Many women have very bad experiences and were still in a traumatic condition for several years after the partition happened. It was clear that the process of partition itself never gave the chance to the Indian people including Hindu, Muslim and Sikh to accomplish the partition peacefully.

During the partition, people from different religions fought each other. No one knows exactly what caused the fighting. The war brought people to madness and no one was responsible for the situation. In this essay I will describe the background of Indian’s partition and how women were involved as victims during the partition process. I also discuss why women became targets for violence during this period and the recovery for abducted women after partition.

2. Background of Partition

There are some reasons for the partition of India and Pakistan, these include the role of census, the legacy of reform, the politics of language, the Lahore resolution of Muslim league, and the electoral success of Muslim League.1 The British administration used the role of census to create separate identity between Hindu and Muslim. Every ten year the census role identified Indian people by their religion. Another reason is the politics of language. There were two languages, Hindi as the dominant language and Urdu the marginalized language. The political situation in India during 1940s brought about the Muslim league wanting to become a separate nation. Jinnah the leader of the Muslim League called for the establishment of Pakistan as an independent country. The historian G.D. Khosla states ; “The Muslim demand for Pakistan was based on the idea that Hindus and Muslim constitute two separate nations, each entitled to a separate and exclusive homeland where they would be free to develop their culture, tradition, religion and polity”.2

With regard to this issue, the British government through Lord Mounbatten as the viceroy and governor general of India announced the partition. Finally, on August 14, 1947 the partition become official3. Thus, the desire to create a separate area between the Muslim and Hindu community instigated British effort to divided the area into India and Pakistan as independent countries.

3. Victimization of Women

Following the partition, during 1947-1948 people traveled back and forth between the two areas extensively. People activity that crossed the border areas can be said as the longest migration history. Muslim people went to Pakistan and Hindu went to India. Since the partition, trains, and huge convoys full of refugees have traveled in both directions. During the trip, many people were killed, especially men, meanwhile women and girls were kidnapped and raped, especially in border areas between the two new countries such as Punjab, Sind, and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The number of women who became victims throughout the partition of India-Pakistan were about 50,000 Muslim women in India and 33,000 non-Muslim women in Pakistan, most of them between 12 years old and 35 years old4.

Ironically, women became the victims of the violence within their society while their neighbors became their enemy. Prior to the partition, the three communities, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had lived together peacefully; they had the same goal and intention to achieve independence of India against the British. In contrast, during partition they came to fight one another, became rude and cruel especially to ‘their’ women. As described in ‘the Earth’ movie (that was we watched in the class on Wednesday February 8, 2006), the nanny of the Parsee family was a woman who took care Lenny, a daughter of this family. She was Hindu and one of the workers who worked for this Zoroastrian family too. Some men worked there too a gardener and a butcher. They came from different ethnic, backgrounds and religions, but worked for the same family and together as coworkers. However, the partition rendered Ice-Candy-Man, one of the workers in Parsee family betrayed the nanny and treat her violently. This Hindu woman became the victim of her circumstances.Other sordid tales about victimization of women can be seen in ‘Cracking India’. A novel written by Sidhwa, bout what happened during the partition. One part of this novel, page 159, described the Ice-Candy-Man reports to his friend that a train from Gudaspur has arrived in Lahore filled with murdered Muslim. Ice-Candy-Man shouts, “Everyone is dead. Butchered. They are all Muslim. There are no young women among the dead! Only two gunny-bags full of women’s breast!”5.

Another form of ill-treatment toward women during the partition can be seen from Miridulla Sarabhai’s story, a woman who worked as a chief social worker for recovering women, she recounts one Sikh man, Dr.Virsa Singh who was known in Amritsar for murdering many women during the partition in order to preserve their honor. “Versa Singh claimed he had shot 50 women personally. First, he shot his own wife because the Muslim came to get them. Once he had done this, all the women in the neighborhood gathered around saying, ‘Viran, pehle mannu maar, pehle mannu maar, (brother, kill me first).6

The examples above clearly portray that the difference of ethnicities and religions after the partition have turned many women into victimis. Unbelievably, women became the real victims, subjugated by the riot situation.

4. Why Women Become Object of Violence?Hindu, Muslim and Sikh’s society believe women are symbols of the dignity of the state. If something bad happens to the women, it would ruin the community. Because of this mindset in the community, women, especially their bodies become targets for their enemy to destroy. A woman’s body is an opportunity for revenge during the partition. Therefore, kidnap, rape, sexual abuse and other defilements of women within these societies during partition were common. As a symbol of the macro community or state and nation, women’s dishonor was linked to the nation, race and country. Because of this concept in the community, men did not consider women as human beings who deserve respect as well; women were just a symbol and tools for more important things including the nation or state.

Related to killing their women themselves like Virsa Singh’s case, it seems to me that women were seen as property of the family. If the family could not protect their property from the enemy, it would be better to annihilate ‘their property’ (or their women) by killing them. I think it is a sort of paradoxical phenomenon, because women have no choice to do what they want to do. They have to follow the family’s rule and for the sake of family’s honor, women have to sacrifice themselves, including suicide or being killed by their relatives.

Violence, rape, and the killing of women are common in war and in madness people situation. However, after the war and riot situations are over, women are still in a subordinate condition and dealing with the calamity and the bad experiences that they had. Fortunately, in the case of partition of India, both India and Pakistan government made an agreement to the recovery and the restoration of the women who were victimized during the partition.

5. Women Recovery and the ProblemsThe recovery program for women, who had been abducted and forcibly converted during the partition process, involved both the governments of India and Pakistan. Their governments, bureaucrats, Member of Parliament and social workers participated in the recovery of their women through restoring the women to their original homes and provided shelters, ‘ashram’ and orphan houses.7

The recovery program was practiced for several years, from 1948 to 1957. Over 30,000 of the total 150, 000 women who were abducted during the partition had been recovered by 19578. From this data, we can see that it was about one-third of the women who were abducted had been recovered successfully; it also shows that the recovery program is not easy. Some women refuse the recovery program because they think that this program just bring them to the other problems. Many cases are found that a woman who had been abducted during the partition process married a man who had a different religion from her after the partition. Consequently, the women converted their religion to follow their husband. Then the partition program forced them to go back to their original area but many women refused that. The strong resistance to return to their country as quoted from Mridula Sarabhai:“You say abduction is immoral and so you are trying to save us. Well now it is too late. One marries only once—willingly or by force. We are now married-What are you going to do with us? Ask us to get married again? Is that immoral? What happened to our relatives when we were abducted? Where were they…? “.9

This statement describes that women have changed their life after partition. They accept their fate far away from their original families after they were abducted, married, and converted to other religions. They do not want to go back to their root culture. Another problem during recovery also afflicted the women who had been distressed with bad experiences. Women cannot revive effectively because of cultural obstacles such as patriarchal system tied people’s mindset that it also influences the recovery of women. It seems that the different cultures determine women during recovering. Marrying by a Muslim man or Hindu man, then living in a new place has different impacts on the women. When they married a Muslim man, there is an impact on their children who their children who cannot be recognized as ‘pure’ Hindu. The culture systems in Hindu society that separates class based on the caste system have marginalized children who were born from a non-Hindu’s father.

This system puts women in a difficult situation. Another example of women in a difficult condition is pregnant women who came from the Hindu community when abortion became legal (at that time was illegal). Woman who have children with Muslim has to abort their unborn baby or leave their children in order to be acceptable in their root family. The children are put in an ‘orphan’ house and children are treated as ‘child war’ in Ashram. This is sort of dilemma of women who have to separate from their child after they got bad experiences. This phenomenon forces women to suffer because women were facing the choice that is hard to choose. As mentioned by Damyati Sahgal;“As time went on, the process of recovery became more and more difficult, apparently the greatest hurdle in the way of forcible recovery was the women’s reluctance to leave their children……Special homes were then set up where unwilling persons could be housed and given time to make up their minds without fear of pressure” 10.

Meanwhile women who marry a Muslim man seems to have few problems, Muslim men married to Hindu women without considering caste. For this reason, there is no cultural obstacle in Muslim community after partition, thus it seems to make sense that the total number of Muslim women recovered was significantly higher, about 20,728 as against 9,032 non-Muslim 11.

6. Conclusion

The partition forces women to become victims of the riot situation. Women felt dislocation and lost their dignity because of sexual abuse and abduction. The abuse women experienced during the partition also demonstrated that women were property, women belonged to their family and were not considered as human beings as well. Women tied down by the cultural obstacles within their community through patriarchal system. Even during recovery, women have suffered from their bad experiences in the past. Men came back from the war as heroes while, after the war and riots, women’s existence seemed to hold no meaning and they remain in the calamity all the time.

1 Gupta, Charu. Lecture in Class, 2/8/06. “Women and Partition in India,”2 Khosla, G.D.Stern Reckoning: a survey of the events leading Up To and Following the Partition of India. Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1989, p.129